Nachimir

At first, they all avoided it because actual god damn journalistic ethics steered them well away from posting about a woman's private life. As it's rolled on and become a bigger thing that gradually switches targets though, and given how badly Kotaku and then Polygon screwed it up*, I've not really been surprised at how gingerly the specialist press have approached it. * Chris Plante Grant shared 1700-strong block list last night with a "block all" button at the top. As well as gaters it had a bunch of minority game developers and games journalists on it too.

I'm starting to have an automatic response to anything related to gaters now, which is just "get the fuck out of my head fuck off fuck off". I don't think I can watch any longer without internalising and mistakenly generalising a deep suspicion and hatred for a particular audience. (I think typing the stuff below has helped exorcise some of it. This really bothers me; a few events I work on have given me a sense of having to fight a scumbag, sexist, harassing element of the audience among developers and gamers alike. To see that element living, breathing and mobilising on Twitter has been dispiriting at best). I've seen various people accuse them of being a cult. They're not, there's too much diversity of thought, but a few groupthink terms have definitely taken hold in the weird little subculture driving this thing. Edit: Sorry, lots of bits added). Patterns I've seen amongst gaters: They impatiently wait for "the next happening" "the happenings" "latest happenings" etc. Most of the people investigating are just shuffling the same conspiracy gifs and youtube videos around without making many edits, few of them seem to do or discuss research. They may be doing that on a private channel, and after someone repeatedly vandalised their etherpad, they've certainly learned to keep backups away from that service. In the places I've been, they do not speak about hacking, though I and others I know have been subject to hack attempts since this started. Gater speculation on wrongdoing means that, to gaters, a person is automatically guilty. Gaters/gater allies committing actual crimes to obtain data on which to speculate is never spoken of as a crime; it's implicitly assumed that it will be admissible in court and the people who obtained it won't be prosecuted. Anything posted by them as evidence is seen as incontrovertible. Any actual evidence that's not in favour of their movement is "out of context", "cherry picking", or immediately claimed to be fake. Gaters have a continuously moving target. Now they're trying to give the IGF a kicking, if someone points out their campaign was apparently about press ethics, they basically reply "Yeah but this came up now and it's bigger". Anyone filing a police report over harassment is accused of not actually filing a police report (because of course "they faked it"). Most seem to think filing an FOIA request for documentation of an ongoing police investigation is fair play and won't be flagged in any way (This assumption in particular makes me think of them as flawed systems thinkers. It reminds me of how broken and biased toward the player game systems tend to be. The guards will forget you. You can always succeed. Means definitely justify the ends, etc.). Anyone who is victimised is just "Playing the victim card". Habits like claiming harassment is faked are backed by, amongst other things, citing Occam's Razor (!). For as long as they can't dominate news cycles, they seek to dominate social platforms, and occasionally speak of their hopes to get on (for instance) the BBC or other major non-games press (A friend asked me on Twitter to explain gamergate to her yesterday, and within a minute had complete strangers popping up to tell her "GamerGate isn't misogynistic!"). They're worse at investigating things than the specialist press they claim are corrupt, because gaters are more tribal than rational. They're rather trust an unhinged youtuber than, say, a much more extensive examination of the IGF that Rock Paper Shotgun did, because the youtuber is one of their own.

Yeah, there are problems in the games industry and press for sure, but whether identify with gaters or not MadJackalope, some of the things you're pointing to are decidedly within the same crazy ballpark as everything they're hooting about.

Also, Rami Ismael made a short post about gamer gate this morning, with an absolutely incredible disclosure statement prefacing it

I felt utterly elated when I saw that stuff coming up on ZQ's feed earlier. Thanks, excellent That's been obvious to a lot of women for a while, though I guess this has especially underlined it for games people. The most profitable thing for Twitter is not to shut down abusers, but to make it feel like the abused can do just enough in reporting them that they then don't want to leave as a result of the abuse. When you can advertise to a hundred abusers versus one victim, well :( Edit: The volume of abuse someone like Zoë receives is also an edge case, though far from isolated, and the approach in any case is definitely startup logic rather than moral. I've started messing around with some alternatives. None of them quite have the functionality of Twitter, but Ello is quite promising (I'd send invites, but I only just got into it and don't have any to send).

Two things helped me overcome shyness: Volunteering for stuff I was interested in, and getting a job in a really busy club. Neither was easy, but that kind of immersion worked really well. Both meant I always had something to do right alongside social things, meaning I could tackle it at my own pace while also always getting out of the house and having the opportunity.

Mind if I tweet these? If attributed, how do you want that?

Bingo! Swapping the memory cards over prompted mine to tell me which PSN account it was associated with. No email, but I have the owners PSN name. Edit: and that led me to his website and Twitter. Thanks!

Sure, but extremely improbable they'd have any record of who's opened the stereo panel up to use the aux input. It could have been in there for many months, or just a few days. I think I'm just going to pass it to the company (Or, construct a ridiculous robot with ten relays and copper tape to brute force the combo. With the 5 attempt limit and 60 minute lockout it would only take… a maximum of 2000 hours to break in ¬¬).

np. Encouragingly, as they've run out of revisions and switched to successive etherpads; traffic, users, and edits have all been tailing off. Also, days later, they're still debating and saying "We don't have a clearly stated goal, what's our actual goal?" Despite the Escapist thing feeling like a victory, they keep asking those questions and failing to express an answer.

I think the end game is that most get distracted and drift away, but the hardcore group of harassers who instigated it remain. Some communities get better at policing abuse, others double down on harbouring it. More women are driven from Twitter and games, the systemic and opportunistic harassment continues on a smaller but nevertheless harrowing scale. Traffic on most gaming news sites is way up compared to August, but they've been crowing over Alexa graphs showing it down. But: Alexa isn't that reliable, they changed the way they compile stats recently, the slump in the graphs starts long before #GameGhazi, and an August slump is a well known phenomenon for video game sites. Hooray for correlation! I finished screen capping their etherpad conversations, because it got really difficult to stomach after a while. Once they found out they were being screenshotted and tweeted, they complained that it was showing their words out of context. Because sure there are nice, ethical ways to praise astroturfing and declare that Jenn Frank "had it coming". Here are all the shots I took: http://puu.sh/bkcsX/21bac6cae7.jpg http://puu.sh/bkcsA/4f90eb1f6f.jpg http://puu.sh/bkUiD/232db02262.jpg http://puu.sh/bkXvc/8a71d42dbf.jpg http://puu.sh/bkXH5/07b4e7ffba.jpg http://puu.sh/bl0Cn/43eb6a24b0.jpg Edit: I couldn't resist another look ¬¬ Here they are fabricating their own story over Jenn quitting games writing: http://puu.sh/bmwTc/0d3917ece1.jpg That's possibly unintentional, but when a primary source is so public and readily available, I think it shows how for some of them, their ideology sways how rigorously they want to check something out. Last one:

This has been done: http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/534673

Linked for time code:

I forget where it was pointed out recently, but the most profitable thing for Twitter seems to be allowing harassers to largely run free, then having just enough of a sop in place for their targets that they don't desert the platform. Edit: That sounds like a hard thing to balance in practice, but I guess you can bank on people's social networks keeping them there more than abuse is likely to scare most away. I've been in a few discussions today with people looking for an alternative, fed up of a platform that systemically enables harassers.

People going after Burch's relationship status reminds me: I read a facebook post earlier, by a woman who pointed out that a lot of this is about policing womens behaviour. The ones who stay quiet aren't being attacked. Other comments on the post were women who are deeply annoyed at having been complemented for being "calm" and "rational" in the past for, basically, not speaking up about bad things or not speaking their minds.

I tried, and quickly switched to blocking. Not only are they impenetrable, but in their public-but-not-public-facing areas, they've freely been referencing the fact that they're astroturfing.

It was a perfect antidote to the plastic sheen of the PR scripts. I was about to close the tab until he came on.

You can truly call yourself a big boy now, dibs.

Does that thing just slam your ass into bare plywood?

Gutted to see that from Jenn this morning, I didn't realise Mattie was out too Edit: That indiegogo already closed or is in the process of it, because the lawyer is married to the guy running it and they didn't disclose. They got their asses handed to them in an AMA. What's mind boggling is that they plan to relaunch, with the same people and just "more transparency". Nobody in the etherpad went "Hold on…" at the fact a guy is canvassing them for money to hire his own wife.

I got one over the weekend. It's a third party one slightly oversized for my ridiculously over-screened phone, and it feels properly shonky compared to the DK1. Might benefit from a bit of modding (goggle strap, phone holding nubs). The magnetic switch is a really elegant idea and well implemented. Tilting your head 90 degrees over to go back in menus feels kind of silly, but so does everything else about it. It's a good novelty for a tenner.

Maybe, but I think it's reasonable that it either won't survive much longer, or differentiating between players and gamers (as analogous to movie buffs) will at least make sense to most people. Yeah, that's partly what I meant when I said the movement lacks a plausible promise. It's too complicated and messed up to have a single, measurable clear goal that people agree on. Without a clear endpoint, no unity among its adherents can last long. The instigating forum responds to that risk with posts about people staying on message (i.e. twitter flooding how-tos, new hashtags, etc.), but the cracks will appear and spread as they lose impetus. With only the "gamers are the real victims here!" narrative left, they'll lack the ability to really achieve anything.

"Worst tabloid methods used by campaigners calling for better press ethics".

Interesting: https://twitter.com/cjkershner/status/505109483878502400

Krystian Majewski tried debating with one of them at length. It's probably the most civil exchange I've seen on it, but the concerns seem to boil down to "Never mind the harassment, we think that might have been faked anyway, and much more importantly the numbers on the reviews might be wrong". I want to feel sad for them, to borrow some words from Charlie Brooker it's like watching a dog try to follow a card trick, but fuck this noise thoroughly. It's rolled on enough that it seems to have roped in gamers who weren't there at the beginning and don't understand the ways gamergate excuses prying into people's private lives. Also, Mike Bithell being sensible on Twitter earlier today: Edit: Also this from Jim Sterling.